Beggars In Spain

“Did it?”

  “Yes. Lovely ones.”

  “And that was your last silly thing? When was it?”

  “Last summer,” Leisha said, and laughed.

  “Well, mine is sooner than that. It’s now. I’m in Boston for no other reason than the spontaneous pleasure of seeing you.”

  Leisha stopped laughing. “That’s an intense tone for a spontaneous pleasure, Richard.”

  “Yup,” he said, intensely. She laughed again. He didn’t.

  “I’ve been in India, Leisha. And China and Africa. Thinking, mostly. Watching. First I traveled like a Sleeper, attracting no attention. Then I set out to meet the Sleepless in India and China. There are a few, you know, whose parents were willing to come here for the operation. They pretty much are accepted and left alone. I tried to figure out why desperately poor countries—by our standards anyway; over there Y-energy is mostly available only in big cities—don’t have any trouble accepting the superiority of Sleepless, whereas Americans, with more prosperity than any time in history, build in resentment more and more.”

  Leisha said, “Did you figure it out?”

  “No. But I figured out something else, watching all those communes and villages and kampongs. We are too individualistic.”

  Disappointment swept Leisha. She saw her father’s face: Excellence is what counts, Leisha. Excellence supported by individual effort…She reached for Richard’s cup. “More coffee?”

  He caught her wrist and looked up into her face. “Don’t misunderstand me, Leisha. I’m not talking about work. We are too much individuals in the rest of our lives. Too emotionally rational. Too much alone. Isolation kills more than the free flow of ideas. It kills joy.”

  He didn’t let go of her wrist. She looked down into his eyes, into depths she hadn’t seen before. It was the feeling of looking into a mine shaft, both giddy and frightening, knowing that at the bottom might be gold or darkness. Or both.

  Richard said softly, “Stewart?”

  “Over long ago. An undergraduate thing.” Her voice didn’t sound like her own.

  “Kevin?”

  “No, never—we’re just friends.”

  “I wasn’t sure. Anyone?”

  “No.”

  He let go of her wrist. Leisha peered at him timidly. He suddenly laughed. “Joy, Leisha.” An echo sounded in her mind, but she couldn’t place it, and then it was gone and she laughed too, a laugh airy and frothy and pink cotton candy in summer.

  “COME HOME, LEISHA. HE’S HAD ANOTHER HEART ATTACK.”

  Susan Melling’s voice on the phone was tired. Leisha said, “How bad?”

  “The doctors aren’t sure. Or say they’re not sure. He wants to see you. Can you leave your studies?”

  It was May, the last push toward her finals. The Law Review proofs were behind schedule. Richard had started a new business, marine consulting to Boston fishermen plagued with sudden inexplicable shifts in ocean currents, and was working twenty hours a day. “I’ll come,” Leisha said.

  Chicago was colder than Boston. The trees were half-budded. On Lake Michigan, filling the huge east windows of her father’s house, whitecaps tossed up cold spray. Leisha saw that Susan was living in the house; her brushes were on Camden’s dresser, her journals on the credenza in the foyer.

  “Leisha,” Camden said. He looked old. Gray skin, sunken cheeks, the fretful and bewildered look of men who accepted potency like air, indivisible from their lives. In the corner of the room, on a small eighteenth-century slipper chair, sat a short, stocky woman with brown braids.

  “Alice.”

  “Hello, Leisha.”

  “Alice. I’ve looked for you…” The wrong thing to say. Leisha had looked, but not very hard, deterred by the knowledge that Alice had not wanted to be found. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” Alice said. She seemed remote, gentle, unlike the angry Alice of six years ago in the raw Pennsylvania hills. Camden moved painfully on the bed. He looked at Leisha with eyes which, she saw, were undimmed in their blue brightness.

  “I asked Alice to come. And Susan. Susan came a while ago. I’m dying, Leisha.”

  No one contradicted him. Leisha, knowing his respect for facts, remained silent. Love hurt her chest.

  “John Jaworski has my will. None of you can break it. But I wanted to tell you myself what’s in it. The past few years I’ve been selling, liquidating. Most of my holdings are accessible now. I’ve left a tenth to Alice, a tenth to Susan, a tenth to Elizabeth, and the rest to you, Leisha, because you’re the only one with the individual ability to use the money to its full potential for achievement.”

  Leisha looked wildly at Alice, who gazed back with her strange remote calm. “Elizabeth? My…mother? Is alive?”

  “Yes,” Camden said.

  “You told me she was dead! Years and years ago!”

  “Yes. I thought it was better for you that way. She didn’t like what you were, was jealous of what you could become. And she had nothing to give you. She would only have caused you emotional harm.”

  Beggars in Spain…

  “That was wrong, Daddy. You were wrong. She’s my mother…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

  Camden didn’t flinch. “I don’t think I was. But you’re an adult now. You can see her if you wish.”

  He went on looking at her with his bright, sunken eyes, while around Leisha the air heaved and snapped. Her father had lied to her. Susan watched her closely, a small smile on her lips. Was she glad to see Camden fall in his daughter’s estimation? Had she all along been that jealous of their relationship, of Leisha…

  She was thinking like Tony.

  The thought steadied her a little. But she went on staring at Camden, who went on staring back implacably, unbudged, a man positive even on his deathbed that he was right.

  Alice’s hand was on her elbow, Alice’s voice so soft that no one but Leisha could hear. “He’s done talking now, Leisha. And after a while you’ll be all right.”

  ALICE HAD LEFT HER SON IN CALIFORNIA with her husband of two years, Beck Watrous, a building contractor she had met while waiting on tables in a resort on the Artificial Islands. Beck had adopted Jordan, Alice’s son.

  “Before Beck there was a real bad time,” Alice said in her remote voice. “You know, when I was carrying Jordan I actually used to dream that he would be Sleepless? Like you. Every night I’d dream that, and every morning I’d wake up and have morning sickness with a baby that was only going to be a stupid nothing like me. I stayed with Ed—in the Appalachian Mountains, remember? You came to see me there once—for two more years. When he beat me, I was glad. I wished Daddy could see. At least Ed was touching me.”

  Leisha made a sound in her throat.

  “I finally left because I was afraid for Jordan. I went to California, did nothing but eat for a year. I got up to 190 pounds.” Alice was, Leisha estimated, five-foot-four. “Then I came home to see Mother.”

  “You didn’t tell me,” Leisha said. “You knew she was alive and you didn’t tell me.”

  “She’s in a drying-out tank half the time,” Alice said, with brutal simplicity. “She wouldn’t see you if you wanted to. But she saw me, and she fell slobbering all over me as her ‘real’ daughter, and she threw up on my dress. And I backed away from her and looked at the dress and knew it should be thrown up on, it was so ugly. Deliberately ugly. She started screaming how Dad had ruined her life, ruined mine, all for you. And do you know what I did?”

  “What?” Leisha said. Her voice was shaky.

  “I flew home, burned all my clothes, got a job, started college, lost fifty pounds, and put Jordan in play therapy.”

  The sisters sat silent. Beyond the window the lake was dark, unlit by moon or stars. It was Leisha who suddenly shook, and Alice who patted her shoulder.

  “Tell me…” Leisha couldn’t think what she wanted to be told, except that she wanted to hear Alice’s voice in the gloom, Alice’s voice as it was now, gentle and remote, without damage a
ny more from the damaging fact of Leisha’s existence. Her very existence as damage. “Tell me about Jordan. He’s five now? What’s he like?”

  Alice turned her head to look levelly into Leisha’s eyes. “He’s a happy, ordinary little boy. Completely ordinary.”

  CAMDEN DIED A WEEK LATER. After the funeral, Leisha tried to see her mother at the Brookfield Drug and Alcohol Abuse Center. Elizabeth Camden, she was told, saw no one except her only child, Alice Camden Watrous.

  Susan Melling, dressed in black, drove Leisha to the airport. Susan talked deftly, determinedly, about Leisha’s studies, about Harvard, about the Law Review. Leisha answered in monosyllables, but Susan persisted, asking questions, quietly insisting on answers: When would Leisha take her bar exams? Where was she interviewing for jobs? Gradually Leisha began to lose the numbness she had felt since her father’s casket was lowered into the ground. She realized that Susan’s persistent questioning was a kindness.

  “He sacrificed a lot of people,” Leisha said suddenly.

  “Not me,” Susan said. “Only for a while there, when I gave up my work to do his. Roger didn’t respect sacrifice much.”

  “Was he wrong?” Leisha said. The question came out with a kind of desperation she hadn’t intended.

  Susan smiled sadly. “No. He wasn’t wrong. I should never have left my research. It took me a long time to come back to myself after that.”

  He does that to people, Leisha heard inside her head. Susan? Or Alice? She couldn’t, for once, remember clearly. She saw her father in the old conservatory, now empty, potting and repotting the exotic flowers he had loved.

  She was tired. It was muscle fatigue from stress, she knew; twenty minutes of rest would restore her. Her eyes burned from unaccustomed tears. She leaned her head back against the car seat and closed her eyes.

  Susan pulled the car into the airport parking lot and turned off the ignition. “There’s something I want to tell you, Leisha.”

  Leisha opened her eyes. “About the will?”

  Susan smiled tightly. “No. You really don’t have any problems with how he divided the estate, do you? It seems reasonable to you. But that’s not it. The research team from Biotech and Chicago Medical has finished its analysis of Bernie Kuhn’s brain.”

  Leisha turned to face Susan. She was startled by the complexity of Susan’s expression. It held determination, and satisfaction, and anger, and something else Leisha could not name.

  Susan said, “We’re going to publish next week, in the New England Journal of Medicine. Security has been unbelievably restricted—no leaks to the popular press. But I want to tell you now, myself, what we found. So you’ll be prepared.”

  “Go on,” Leisha said. Her chest felt tight.

  “Do you remember when you and the other Sleepless kids took interleukin-1 to see what sleep was like? When you were sixteen?”

  “How did you know about that?”

  “You kids were watched a lot more closely than you think. Remember the headache you got?”

  “Yes.” She and Richard and Tony and Carol and Brad and Jeanine…after her rejection by the Olympic Committee, Jeanine had never skated again. She was a kindergarten teacher in Butte, Montana.

  “Interleukin-1 is what I want to talk about. At least partly. It’s one of a whole group of substances that boost the immune system. They stimulate the production of antibodies, the activity of white blood cells, and a host of other immunoenhancements. Normal people have surges of IL-1 released during the slow-wave phases of sleep. That means that they—we—are getting boosts to the immune system during sleep. One of the questions we researchers asked ourselves twenty-eight years ago was: will Sleepless kids who don’t get those surges of IL-1 get sick more often?”

  “I’ve never been sick,” Leisha said.

  “Yes, you have. Chicken pox and three minor colds by the end of your fourth year,” Susan said precisely. “But in general you were all a very healthy lot. So we researchers were left with the alternate theory of sleep-driven immunoenhancement: that the burst of immune activity existed as a counterpart to a greater vulnerability of the body in sleep to disease, probably in some way connected to the fluctuations in body temperature during REM sleep. In other words, sleep caused the immune vulnerability that endogenous pyrogens like IL-1 counteracted. Sleep was the problem, immune-system enhancements were the solution. Without sleep, there would be no problem. Are you following this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course you are. Stupid question.” Susan brushed her hair off her face. It was going gray at the temples. There was a tiny brown age spot beneath her right ear.

  “Over the years we collected thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Single Photon Emission Tomography scans of you kids’ brains, plus endless EEG’s, samples of cerebrospinal fluid, and all the rest of it. But we couldn’t really see inside your brains, really know what’s going on in there. Until Bernie Kuhn hit that embankment.”

  “Susan,” Leisha said, “give it to me straight. Without more buildup.”

  “You’re not going to age.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, cosmetically, a little—sagging due to gravity, maybe. But the absence of sleep peptides and all the rest of it affects the immune and tissue-restoration systems in ways we don’t understand. Bernie Kuhn had a perfect liver. Perfect lungs, perfect heart, perfect lymph nodes, perfect pancreas, perfect medulla oblongata. Not just healthy, or young—perfect. There’s a tissue regeneration enhancement that clearly derives from the operation of the immune system but is radically different from anything we ever suspected. Organs show no wear and tear, not even the minimal amount expected in a seventeen-year-old. They just repair themselves, perfectly, on and on…and on.”

  “For how long?” Leisha whispered.

  “Who the hell knows? Bernie Kuhn was young. Maybe there’s some compensatory mechanism that cuts in at some point and you’ll all just collapse, like an entire fucking gallery of Dorian Grays. But I don’t think so. Neither do I think it can go on forever; no tissue regeneration can do that. But a long, long time.”

  Leisha stared at the blurred reflections in the car windshield. She saw her father’s face against the blue satin of his casket, banked with white roses. His heart, unregenerated, had given out.

  Susan said, “The future is all speculative at this point. We know that the peptide structures that build up the pressure to sleep in normal people resemble the components of bacterial cell walls. Maybe there’s a connection between sleep and pathogen receptivity. We don’t know. But ignorance never stopped the tabloids. I wanted to prepare you because you’re going to get called supermen, homo perfectus, who-all-knows what. Immortal.”

  The two women sat in silence. Finally Leisha said, “I’m going to tell the others. On our datanet. Don’t worry about the security. Kevin Baker designed Groupnet; nobody knows anything we don’t want them to.”

  “You’re that well organized already?”

  “Yes.”

  Susan’s mouth worked. She looked away from Leisha. “We better go in. You’ll miss your flight.”

  “Susan…”

  “What?”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Susan said, and in her voice Leisha heard the thing she had seen before in Susan’s expression and had not been able to name: it was longing.

  TISSUE REGENERATION. A LONG, LONG TIME, sang the blood in Leisha’s ears on the flight to Boston. Tissue regeneration. And, eventually: immortal. No, not that, she told herself severely. Not that. The blood didn’t listen.

  “You sure smile a lot,” said the man next to her in first class, a business traveler who had not recognized Leisha. “You coming from a big party in Chicago?”

  “No. From a funeral.”

  The man looked shocked, then disgusted. Leisha looked out the window at the ground far below. Rivers like micro-circuits, fields like neat index cards. And on the horizon, fluffy white clouds like masses of exotic flowers, blooms i
n a conservatory filled with light.

  THE LETTER WAS NO THICKER THAN ANY HARD-COPY MAIL, but hard-copy mail addressed by hand to either of them was so rare that Richard was nervous. “It might be explosive.” Leisha looked at the letter on their hall credenza. MS. LIESHA CAMDEN. Block letters, misspelled.

  “It looks like a child’s writing,” she said.

  Richard stood with head lowered, legs braced apart. But his expression was only weary. “Perhaps deliberately like a child’s. You’d be more open to a child’s writing, they might have figured.”

  “‘They’? Richard, are we getting that paranoid?”

  He didn’t flinch from the question. “Yes. For the time being.”

  A week earlier the New England Journal of Medicine had published Susan’s careful, sober article. An hour later the broadcast and datanet news had exploded in speculation, drama, outrage, and fear. Leisha and Richard, along with all the Sleepless on the Groupnet, had tracked and charted each of four components, looking for a dominant reaction: speculation (“The Sleepless may live for centuries, and this might lead to the following events…”); drama (“If a Sleepless marries only Sleepers, he may have lifetime enough for a dozen brides, and several dozen children, a bewildering blended family…”); outrage (“Tampering with the law of nature has only brought among us unnatural so-called people who will live with the unfair advantage of time: time to accumulate more kin, more power, more property than the rest of us could ever know…”); and fear (“How soon before the Super-race takes over?”).

  “They’re all fear, of one kind or another,” Carolyn Rizzolo finally said, and the Groupnet stopped its differentiated tracking.

  Leisha was taking the final exams of her last year of law school. Each day comments followed her to the campus, along the corridors and in the classroom; each day she forgot them in the grueling exam sessions, in which all students were reduced to the same status of petitioner to the great university. Afterward, temporarily drained, she walked silently back home to Richard and the Groupnet, aware of the looks of people on the street, aware of her bodyguard Bruce striding between her and them.

  “It will calm down,” Leisha said. Richard didn’t answer.